If somebody handed you a shovel on a 90-degree day while in your Sunday best, you’d give him or her a look.

Not Scott Harl.

Peru’s mayor happily risked a trip to the cleaners to turn his shovel.

Harl was all smiles Thursday morning as the city of Peru broke ground on its $10 million police station. A year from now, Peru’s finest will have moved out of its decades-old (and showing it) police station and into a modern complex that will have been constructed without boosting Peru’s tax rates by so much as a penny.

“This is a wonderful day,” Harl said. “This is something that I wanted to do when I was elected back in 2009. Everything takes time, but we went about it the right way.

“Now we’re ready for the future.”

Harl may have yearned for this more than a decade, but he’d have to step back much farther in time to pinpoint the day when police decided the current location on Fourth and West streets no longer was adequate.

The current station is a former auto dealership that was awkwardly retrofitted into a law enforcement center. It was ill-suited from the start, and Father Time has done the building no favors.

City officials have spent recent years weighing their options and took the most prominent step forward in 2018 when police chief Doug Bernabei proposed working with neighboring cities in a “shared policing” program. The proposal to merge resources included a plan to work from a joint headquarters. One by one, however, the parties foresaw problems and bowed out.

Far from viewing the withdrawals as a setback, Bernabei said, the discussions showed the respective agencies did their due diligence before deciding their future needs had to be met individually, rather than collectively.

“It would have been fair for people to say, ‘Well, how come you didn’t investigate a metro department?' " Bernabei said. “We did. It was a very detailed investigation, and we found out for various reasons it wasn’t going to work for any of the four communities.”

And once the public saw Peru was serious about how to best utilize its resources, he said, the public greeted a new Peru law enforcement complex with mounting enthusiasm.

“The feedback that I’ve gotten and all the police officers are getting has been overwhelmingly positive,” he said. “The feedback has been nothing but, ‘You need this. We want this. It’s a great location. It’s going to a great thing for the future generations of Peru.' ”

It helps that Harl fulfilled an early pledge to construct the $10 million station without raising taxes. The city, he explained, retired several bonds, and the revenue stream used to pay them down could now simply be diverted into the building project. The city also buoyed its credit rating and has secured bonds at a dirt-cheap rate just north of 2%.

A committee was tasked with finding a site central to Peru’s sprawling city limits, rather than central to the four cities. They settled on 6½ acres west of Hy-Vee. The city acquired parcels on a forthcoming extension of Midtown Road at North Peoria Street.

"We feel pretty strongly that's going to be the center of the city," engineer Eric Carls said at the time, citing the proximity not only to the Route 251 retail corridor and Interstate 80 but also to future subdivisions to the north and west.

With a site identified, city officials visited recently-constructed police stations for ideas to incorporate into the proposed complex. Designers have proposed segregated parking areas and entrances for police and the public, ensuring optimal safety for both. The new complex features a community room plus expanded evidence storage and garage space to extend the life-expectancy of police vehicles.

To build it, Peru tabbed Leopardo Construction. Leigh McMillen, senior vice president, said they aren’t really excited to get started because they already have. Motorists soon will see walls being raised, and the baking heat that had Harl mopping his brow is actually perfect for the job at hand.

“We are gathering momentum very quickly,” McMillen said. “We’re extremely excited to have this project moving forward right now.”

As for the pandemic, McMillen said they’ve been able to tackle an array of projects while following public health guidelines to the letter. The outlook is strong for finishing on time, which means police could begin the lengthy move-in operations in spring 2021 with an eye on commencing full-time operations — and a ribbon cutting — by summer.